"We live in a world where digital products are inherently undervalued relative to other products. We will shell out $5 for a pumpkin spice latte in a heartbeat, but the second we have to pay $1.99 for an app, we begin to conduct cost-benefit analysis as if we were buying a damn house."<p>This is something I think about a lot, especially as a developer of a service that will one day require subscription (Yipgo).<p>When I buy a coffee, I walk into a physical building, staffed by people who I've got a two way relationship with and I get a physical coffee. As well as the experience itself, there's more a more tangable product in the coffee than there is a blog I might subscribe to. I'm not saying we shouldn't pay for it, I'm just suggesting that might be the phsycology that explains it a little.
I'm struggling to work out what Medium is going to offer in an 'upgraded' reading experience that is going to make it worth paying for.<p>The problem that they face is that the core asset they own - other people's content - just isn't that compelling.<p>There are a couple of reasons for this, but here are a couple:<p>- People go to Medium to find an audience for their work. Medium has no meaningful brand / identity / curation / editorial voice of its own, so Medium posts tend to be posts that people have thrown up their, tagged, and hoped to find an audience.<p>- There's very little way of an author or a writer building their brand through Medium. This is because all of the articles are presented in exactly the same way with the exact same layout features. Even if I remember an article, I'm going to struggle to remember who wrote it.<p>- Although Medium launched with the promise of helping to launch undiscovered writers and rewarding attention minutes, in practice this has actually ended up being 'he or she who has the most Twitter followers wins'. This means that the same folks who win on Twitter, and Medium simply ends up being another outlet for their voice.<p>- People who are prepared to wade through all of the above on the off chance that they'll strike it lucky and their article will end up with a few thousand shares have worked out how to game Medium. This has filled Medium with the kind of low grade motivational bullshit no one in their right mind would pay for.<p>- It's really hard to believe any pitch that starts with 'I know we've ploughed through $132m in venture money so far, but it'll all get better when we ask people to pay for it.'<p>Either Medium has some very heavyweight content partners lined up - in which case, the rank and file creators are just SEO fodder - or Medium is doomed.
Why would I subscribe to Medium in the hope that it becomes some sort of real organisation, with good writing, when those already exist? Sorry, but I think I'll just keep paying for The Guardian, The LRB, N+1, MIT Technology Review etc and patronising my local bookshops.<p>I'm not poopooing the idea of Medium going subscription, FWIW, but this author's call to arms is a bit ridiculous.
A lot of attention is being put in this piece as to how this will affect the reader - which okay, this is ostensibly a service built <i>for</i> readers and I get that.<p>I'm genuinely and truly hoping though Medium plans to address how this will impact writers on the platform. Not only do I have my own publication on Medium, I contribute to a column ran by a major name in sports journalism.<p>How is this subscription service going to benefit <i>writers</i>?<p>Will it at all? I don't know if I can keep my publication on a site that's charging my readers while I continue to write for free-though I understand Ev and Co.'s want to monetize the platform. When there's a element of everyone contributing content for the same reward (eyeballs and shares), suddenly bringing money into this has me as a writer wondering "Okay, I provide value to your platform by driving visitors to the site, but now you're telling me you plan to charge my readers? That's cool, but what's in it for me?"
I don’t think I will pledge until I see drastic improvements in two areas: Content (still lots of posts pushing a very orthodox agenda, lots of self-help fluff and too much start-up techy stuff. Not enough challenging or interesting general reads), and the Reading Experience: I can’t believe I have to export to Pocket (which is currently doing a better job providing me good content that Medium is) in order to get things like white on black or sepia themes, a choice of fonts with ligatures and full justification. Auto-scrolling would be nice too.
> We are at a crossroads of consumer attention when it comes to reading, writing, and the “blogosphere”. With the seemingly endless amount of standalone blogs out there on the web, the market is thirsting for a platform that will consolidate blogging, and bring the value it provides into one convenient and curated location. ... YouTube did this exact thing for filmmakers, comedians, musicians and more. Instagram did this exact thing for photographers and models. Let’s do what we can do to make sure this happens on Medium!<p>So we are saying that centralising on one platform is the only way forwards? That may be right, but I feel like that's a point that could do with a hell of a lot more consideration ...
This has now been unlinked from the original submission (<a href="https://medium.com/the-mission/wow-its-official-the-subscription-model-is-coming-to-medium-134bc0846f6e#.57orkwlct" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/the-mission/wow-its-official-the-subscrip...</a>), which contained this gem:<p><i>Personally, I couldn’t count how many Medium articles have changed my life, but a conservative estimate would be hovering around 50.</i><p>I think perhaps the disconnect between this extraordinary statement [1] and the reality of people who might actually pay to read things on Medium is perhaps indicative of why this might not be the great success they're hoping it will be.<p>[1] I have read plenty of articles on Medium and I'm not sure even a dozen of them have had me thinking about them five minutes later, never mind "changed my life".
This post is telling me to take a pledge to subscribe without telling me what I'm suppposed to be getting. How about we clarify that first and then I decide if this glorified blogging platform is worth it.<p>And to the point made in the article about digital products being undervalued in relation to physical ones, maybe people don't feel like all these digital products provide that much value to them.
How often does a channel become a brand name?<p>Netflix became a household name in the DVD era because they had a unique and useful value prop. Ditto Facebook (well, not unique at time of creation but they managed it very well). But nobody says they want to sit down to watch an NBC show or some RCA music.<p>Even when you manage the content creation the name brand is hard to maintain Yes, Disney and many of its sub brands, and a very small number of news sources like NYT, but they are the exception.<p>In fact the channel model tends not only to be a painful business (has to be made up in volume) but chews up the branding further downstream (car companies worry about being genericized by self-driving fleet managers).<p>Medium has chosen a tough row to how.
I like Medium and I DO hope it goes ahead with the subscription model. It will make it easier for me to stop procrastinating and to read something more useful, like arxiv articles.
It seems a lose-lose situation to get readers to pay to consume content. The most valuable part of Medium is that it has a large audience that writers want to reach. Surely a better monetization strategy would be to allow promoted posts so that even the individual creator can pay to reach more readers.
> Founded in 2011, Medium has raised $132 million, and now it looks like there’s a plan to start making good on those investments.<p>Oh, the snark. Yeah, you don't pay back $132m getting people to pay for bog standard blog posts.
Personally, I would find it hard to shell out money for a Medium subscription, simply because I'd detest paying for a subscription and still myself short of quality stuff by New Yorker. Imagine the same scenario in music streaming — paying for Spotify and still unable to access most of songs you'd like.<p>Frankly, it seems advertising is more obvious option for Medium rather than building a subscription business. Surely, it's despised, but one must wonder what chances Facebook would have had if it thought of creating a "$1 / month" social network.
How is the Svbtle model working out? The one where they charge content creators $ to host on their site but readers get to read the content for free.<p>Maybe Medium should have gone this way instead. I find it difficult that there's a working model in which subscription from the readers is going to be sufficient enough to survive, much less grow. Of course certain site s are capable of doing this (NYT, Economist, etc). Medium? I dunno.
One of the biggest turn-offs when I'm thinking about clicking a link to an article is seeing that it's at Medium. So many things there are of such low quality that I can't imagine wanting to pay for it. If anything, I would pay whomever could find a way to forever remove half-baked think pieces and Silicon Valley posturing from my life.
I really like hackernoon and could see myself paying for more content like that.<p>If they could convince some more high(er) profile tech/startup bloggers to use their platform, like Ben Thompson from exponent or Benedict Evans from A16Z, i'd definitely at least try it.
><i>If Medium can get enough of its readers to subscribe to a paid product with extra features, it may be able to achieve its initial goal of building a different business model for publishers.</i><p>A subscription model is different?
My issue with Medium is low barrier to entry for most authors. Whenever I see a HN post which links to Medium I never click on it. I have read many Medium post which ended up being self promotional pieces with little or no substance or flat out click-bait.
FWIW, this posting doesn't appear to be an official Medium announcement, just something written (badly) on their platform by a third-party.<p>mods: maybe change the URL to <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/medium-subscriptions/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/medium-subscriptions/</a> ?<p>(edit: thank you mods)